[Mordiganne]

The Universe is expanding.... (pics to follow in next post)

Nothing new at all outside of random fodder. No rush to get the few remaining things I want. Get 'em when I get 'em. In comic news I haven't read anything in a while. Just haven't had the time. I grabbed some Nick Fury stuff on digital. Maybe I'll give them a read soon. Actually, now that I think about it I got a set of "What If...?" on digital so I'll read through those. That'll provide a number of new looks. Speaking of comics, I painted the Casket of Ancient Winters to match the comic coloring. Looks nice. Usually for me a custom is born out of inspiration, boredom, wanting to add a new character or even just working to complete a team. Sometimes, however, it's a matter of convenience. Omega Red is a QEC that I made just to not have those annoying - and really long - arm coils taking up display space. Those stupid things aren't even removable. Good job, Hasbro! So to remedy that I bought yet another Omega Red, cut off the coils, drilled out holes in each wrist, then shortened the coils significantly so I can either not have them there at all or only have the shorter lengths in to save on space. I also used a red gloss and hit the shoulder & knee pads and the forearm guards. Looks pretty cool. I always liked how Hasbro put Omega Red together but now I really enjoy having the figure on display. Plus he'll no longer looks like he's trying to goose Deadpool with his coils when on display. And, if I have a pressing need to have him displayed with full coils extended I just have to switch out the arms. Tiger stripe & brown outfit Wolverine are there because I liked how the gloss job on X-23 turned out so much I grabbed the other two display Wolverines and glossed those same parts. I also hit them with a matte spray to get rid of that plastic shine. I think they look great. Like these two even more now. So, anyway, onto the rest...


Sharon Carter - I never read many Cap comics as a kid. The action aspects of the character never really translated from the page for me. Thus, I never had much exposure to his stable of characters until the MCU came about which brought me a new appreciation for all things Cap. So, I wanted to start getting more of Cap's supporting cast made. I started with Sharon Carter because she was the easiest and because she was already partially put together from years ago. There's really not much to say about this custom. It's among the laziest customs I've ever made in that all I did was slap some white paint on her. Oh and the Sue Storm head from the boxed set. Other than that...yeah, not a thing. At least I got another Cap ally done. Thinking of that blonde female Cap girl next. Ms America or something like that? Not sure what her name is. I'll look it up another time.

Demogoblin - I can't really recall Demogoblin's actual origin. I first ran across him during the second Infinity event where he took the body of the Spidey Doppelganger for whatever he ended up doing with it. I don't know if he did much else in the story either. To be frank I don't have much of an opinion on the character at all but I wanted to make him since I got an extra Hobgoblin figure in the aforementioned Spider-Man gift set - which yielded the rather surprisingly detailed Demogoblin head. This is a distinctly different head than the Hobgoblin figure's head, so it made that 4-pack even more worth the purchase. Plus, it also marked the unofficial start of my "Goblin upgrade project" to bring the undersized goblin figures up to par with the rest of my collection. Starting with the head I added sculpt to the sides for the tattered hood look Demogoblin has. I also added to the peak extending that down further and finished with the long serpent-like tongue. Added sculpt to the legs and arms for the rips and such in those spots. Sculpted on the devil head at the waist and the belt across his chest. I thought about using a plastic belt, but there was no good way to attach it and sculpting on the belt just made way more sense. Considering I had no intention of making this figure on this buck to begin with it came out really well. I might make him another longer cape but that's undecided at this point. The short cape looks good. I doubt I'll ever make a Doppleganger figure, however, I can never say never. But it'd be a long while before I made one, that's for sure.

Wolverine (Laura) - It took me a while to get this figure in my collection because she never showed locally and was going for ridiculous prices online that I just wasn't willing to pay. Recently she dropped in price so I grabbed a couple with the intent to just give her an extra set of clawless hands and call it a day. Well once I had the figure in hand the hair immediately irked me. Since it was so "action" oriented it would look bizarre in my display. But I still liked the hair and wanted to keep that as well. So since I had two, I went the full nine and made a custom project out of her. In the end I gave her an abundance of swap-out options. After cutting the claws from the extra hands I drilled some small holes into the extra set of boots and affixed a claw into each. Then I took the second head and cut off the hair with the intent of sculpting straight hair. Rather than having to do that I just rotated the hair and attached it back to the head. (This wasn't a straight forward process. Took a lot of work to get the fit right.) So she also has another portrait for standing around still which better fits my display. I might even make her a third maskless portrait, but I haven't decided if I want to do that or not since it wouldn't be just a maskless head if I did. Gray belts annoy me so I painted her belt black and glossed it. I also glossed both sets of boots and the wings on her masks. Oh, and ironically I have paint that perfectly matches both the blue plastic and the yellow paint Hasbro used, so she got a full repaint from head to toe. Mainly to crisp up the lines, there was yellow overspray everywhere on both. On one the paint for the right eye was halfway down the mask from where it should have been. And, interesting little factoid, they sculpted the mask lines down the jaw and under her chin. Thought that was an interesting extra detail given her release period. In my MU Laura isn't a Wolverine replacement. Rather I view her in the DC model where she styles her costume after Logan's as an homage to the mantel of the Wolverine. That angle makes the character work for me in this outfit as she will always be X-23, in my view, and not a simple Wolverine derivative.

Carnage - I used to be a big fan of Carnage back in the day. It was really nice to see a flat out evil character in Marvel for a change. There weren't many of them back when I was big into comics. Most of Marvels villains have a "moral center" in that they have justifications for their actions (i.e. Magneto/Thanos) however misguided those justifications may be. Not Carnage. Carnage was a straight up killer! He never tried to rationalize it, or justify it. He didn't care, he just wanted to kill and the symbiote spawn gave him the ability to do that on a grand scale. It's a shame Marvel rarely takes those kinds of chances these days, but they did with Carnage and I needed to get a figure of him into my collection. Unfortunately all that's out there are the slightly undersized ones from the Spider-Man line of figures. I wasn't buying the Spider-Man figures back then since they're all so short, but that doesn't matter since I never saw a Carnage in stores anyway. I got this guy from a figure 4-pack a bit ago with some other translucent figures. (Cheapest way to get him plus gave me Demogoblin fodder). Since Carnage isn't see-thru it meant I had to paint him. Very laboriously paint him. I ended up just repainting the whole figure since Hasbro was too cheap to paint the back of it anyway. While painting him I kept looking at the all black forearms and lower legs and it kept looking off to me. Finally it was bothering me too much so I looked up some art and sighed. I had to paint those parts too. I also painted the eyes and toned down that silly bright pink color in his mouth. Lastly I added a few extra tendrils to him. I didn't go too crazy with the tendrils as I'm not a fan of the over exaggerated tendril look. Anyway, this is one of the rare smallish figures that I'm ok with. Unlike the ridiculously under-sized MCU Thor figures or their like, I view Cletus Cassidy as a lanky, weasely, kind of guy and that puts this figure right in line with how I envision him. With Venom already in the fold and now Carnage, I am completely set with symbiotes in my collection. I'm stopping with these two.

Rescue (Pepper Potts) - So I have no real idea what the story is behind the Rescue armor becoming a thing. I might have looked it up at some point but apparently it didn't resonate with me or I'd remember it. In the end I made this not for the armor aspect, but because it allowed me to get a Pepper Potts figure of some sort into my collection. I've had the character, as Rescue, on the list for a while but never got around to her because I didn't know a good way to get a realistic looking female Iron-Man armor. After getting a space armor Gamora figure - for the head - I thought the body might be passable with an Iron-Man head and some tweaking. Ultimately that combo didn't look quite right...it had the same problem that most Iron-Man figures in general have. It was too small to even approximate having an adult human being inside of it. But, I did like the torso and decided to use it as a base to create a real suit of armor on. Now this is a figure that looks like it could have an MU scale female figure inside of it. I drilled out part of the chest cavity to fit the "arc reactor". The legs (& hands) came from some Iron-Man figure. They're just about perfect for her design and they fit the body perfectly. I sculpted the armor on the torso and arms. Speaking of the arms, I took off the lower arm/hand combo from the figure and swapped them out with arms from a standard female figure to increase articulation and add wrist swivels. I sculpted the mask over a helmeted Capt. Marvel head. After a paint job I glossed over all the armor plates. I used a Marauder head and ponytail from Omega Red for the unmasked Pepper Potts portrait. I couldn't find a single Rescue armor art piece that I liked enough to want to make the entire suit from, so I took bits and pieces from a couple of different ones and added my own touches in parts. Rescue turned out to be good practice at sculpting armor as I have a number of additional Iron-Man suits I want to have in my collection and the only way to get them is to make them. Should be an annoying pain in the ass project, but also fun. In my MU Rescue came to be following a devastating AIM attack on Stark Tower (a nod to the A:EMH episode) while he was upstate overseeing construction of a new Avengers facility. The assault left 12 dead and 39 wounded including Potts. During her recovery period following the attack Tony made Pepper her own suit of armor - complete with J.A.N.I.S. AI system - with less offensive weaponry and more defensive capabilities so that she can defend herself and Stark Tower when he's not around. Though Pepper is not a crime fighting superhero she does occasionally don the armor to take part in emergency response operations within the tri-state area.

Red Guardian (Tania) - I only know of this character because of researching art to make my first Red Guardian custom. As soon as I saw the design I wanted to make her. She's both another female character as well as a non-US based heroine. Ultimately, even as much as I wanted to make her, I put her off for a couple of reasons. First I already had a Red Guardian so there wasn't a pressing need for her, and more importantly, I didn't know how to make her mask. Tania has one of the strangest pieces of headgear that I've come across in a while. It's got this odd half head design that wraps her face and stops halfway across her head. Just strange. Anyway, I finally figured out how to pull off that look. I had to add some sculpt to the head after chopping chunks of the hair off. Then I added the belt circle and the glove cuffs. The boots were cobbled together from a few sources. No sculpting there. Annnd...she's ready to join the rest of the Winter Guard on the shelf. I've taken to displaying all of the Red Guardian's in my collection since each is a different character. She'll be Red Guardian #3 on display. Now that she's in the fold I'm keen to add another non-U.S. based female hero with Sabra. Not sure when I'll get around to her, though, but I will at some point.

Wolverine (Alpha Flight) - While researching art for Heather Hudson - whom (as Vindicator) I'd forgotten I wanted to add to Alpha Flight - I stumbled upon a couple of art pieces of Wolverine in a Guardian inspired Alpha Flight costume. Which reminded me of the "What If...?" issue where he stayed with Alpha Flight and took over as team leader. I blended a couple of the designs together to make this look which I think is pretty interesting. The blend of the Canadian flag's red and white color combo looks as good here as it does on Guardian and will on Vindicator. Custom-wise these bodies are a bitch to take apart, and since I don't play with the figures or anything I decided not to even bother and just gave this guy a surface paint. He won't be doing anything but standing on the shelf with the rest of Alpha Flight. The red on his gloves and boots are glossed, and there's a two color scheme on the boots, but it's hard to make out the differences if you're not used to looking at color shades - the gloss doesn't help with that either. I'm not a fan of the paint washed look, but I gave his upper back and chest a light wash just to highlight. I used a darker, less watered down mix of the same gray on his mask, but I brushed that on. I'm not sure how well the camera is going to pick this up, but it looks pretty nice in person. Anyway, this was just a quicky custom that I worked on to pass some time while waiting on figures from the last batch to finish curing. I'll be putting him into the display with the other Alpha Flight figs as an homage to the "What If...?" series, of which I plan to make more characters from. Still need to get a Watcher to keep an eye on the display, but he's a pricey fellow. In time...

Jessica Jones (Jewel) - I've only read a couple of things with her in it to this point. I was pretty firmly out of the comic world when she was created. But she is a new character so I wanted to make a figure of her. Towards the end of the MU's run Hasbro was making some great heads for the line while pairing them with horrible bodies. Jessica Jones exemplifies that perfectly. Hasbro put a new head on a horrid body when they could have just as easily taken that same head and slapped it on an older body as I did here. Simple yet effective. Oh well, wasted opportunity... Custom-wise she was a quick paint job and minor sculpt work with the gloves and diamond. I also repainted the head and darkened that purple hair some so it doesn't look so Jem and the Holograms-ish. Not much more to say about her, but with her addition the Defenders are done. Now I'm glad I made that brighter red Daredevil figure, with Jones I was able to create a modern day Defenders team. Another team down, so many yet to make...